E# - from a glacial tune

On an album by Peter Weibel, word was, "Hear the forms of darkness," which could also be the motto for the audio film E# – from a glacial tune. The starting point is the true story of a mountain climber who survived six days in a crevasse. Peter Kutin and Florian Kindlinger didn´t turn the story into a documentary narrative, instead, they rely entirely on medial transformation — a type of re-mediation that plays out primarily at the acoustic level. At the start the viewer is blinded by a flashing light in an abruptly appearing sequence, for which there is an opponent to the film close to the end: you hear loud, rhythmic steps over threateningly creaking ice, while the view is turned to the surrounding glacial landscape, or directly into the sun. Following a brief introductory text insert comes the fall into abysmal darkness. Slowly, the first sounds peel from the entropic, gloomy environment; the dripping of water, a soft flow, and deliberate beeps. Kutin and Kindlinger prepared field recordings on-site, that is, in a crevasse, which capture resonance patterns that arise in recordings made in such narrow spaces. The video passage designed by Billy Roisz in the middle part of the film corresponds with this genesis of form — the sound continually enriches itself, becomes increasingly more "resonant." Bit-by-bit, contours become evident, outlines of blocks of ice and glacial walls, which are subsequently subjected to Roisz´s characteristic analogue image-blending process. A bizarre visual unconscious looms — as though the psyches of those captured here descend deep into the first and most fundamental imaging levels. Until everything becomes black here, too, while the audio film slowly dies away and only a soft whispering of wind can be heard. But escape draws near, and a larger-than-life white stroboscope storm explodes into E# in the end: which again doubly accentuates the previously sounded out forms of darkness.

(Christian Höller)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt